Lightboard at ACU

Teaching in an online or blended environment can make it difficult to introduce complex ideas without losing the familiar connectedness of the face-to-face classroom. To help bridge this gap and let faculty build on the comfort of presenting ideas visually on a board, the Learning Studio introduced the Lightboard to the ACU campus in a pilot in Spring 2015.

How It Works

The Lightboard allows faculty to intuitively produce short videos that introduce key concepts visually as they speak directly to a camera. LEDs illuminate a thick pane of tempered glass between the teacher and the camera, and the teacher writes directly on the glass with neon markers to illustrate points and concepts as they talk.

The Lightboard was designed by Michael Peshkin at Northwestern University and updated with improvements from teams at Duke, Notre Dame, and schools around the country. The following examples illustrate a few of the ways the lightboard supports presentations in different fields.